Boy, a couple Columbus statues get beheaded and tossed in the water and suddenly everyone’s like, “what, Columbus? Good?”
“Other people after Columbus did the genocide, right?”
And then you read Howard Zinn.
Columbus promised to bring the King and Queen “as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as they ask.
Columbus and his men “rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town.”
Columbus “ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.”
After the Indians unsuccessfully tried to fight the soldiers, “mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.”
So, when people casually dismiss genocide, what they’re dismissing is horrific rape, torture, mutilation, and murder on a mass scale. I think the time has come to remake Columbus Day, as Fuck Columbus Day.
Melodramatic Physician 
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